Analytic solutions for parallel transport along generic bound geodesics in Kerr spacetime

We provide analytical closed form solutions for the parallel transport along a bound geodesic in Kerr spacetime. This can be considered the lowest order approximation for the motion a spinning black hole in an extreme mass-ratio inspiral. As an illustration of the usefulness of our new found expressions we scope out the locations of spin-spin resonances in quasi-circular EMRIs. All solutions are given as functions of Mino time, which facilitates the decoupling of the equations of motion. To help physical interpretation, we also provide an analytical expression for the proper time along a geodesic as a function of Mino time

Qualitative Effects of Knowledge Rules in Probabilistic Data Integration

One of the problems in data integration is data overlap: the fact that different data sources have data on the same real world entities. Much development time in data integration projects is devoted to entity resolution. Often advanced similarity measurement techniques are used to remove semantic duplicates from the integration result or solve other semantic conflicts, but it proofs impossible to get rid of all semantic problems in data integration. An often-used rule of thumb states that about 90% of the development effort is devoted to solving the remaining 10% hard cases. In an attempt to significantly decrease human effort at data integration time, we have proposed an approach that stores any remaining semantic uncertainty and conflicts in a probabilistic database enabling it to already be meaningfully used. The main development effort in our approach is devoted to defining and tuning knowledge rules and thresholds. Rules and thresholds directly impact the size and quality of the integration result. We measure integration quality indirectly by measuring the quality of answers to queries on the integrated data set in an information retrieval-like way. The main contribution of this report is an experimental investigation of the effects and sensitivity of rule definition and threshold tuning on the integration quality. This proves that our approach indeed reduces development effort — and not merely shifts the effort to rule definition and threshold tuning — by showing that setting rough safe thresholds and defining only a few rules suffices to produce a ‘good enough’ integration that can be meaningfully used

Quality Measures in Uncertain Data Management

Many applications deal with data that is uncertain. Some examples are applications dealing with sensor information, data integration applications and healthcare applications. Instead of these applications having to deal with the uncertainty, it should be the responsibility of the DBMS to manage all data including uncertain data. Several projects do research on this topic. In this paper, we introduce four measures to be used to assess and compare important characteristics of data and systems

First-Principles Investigation of Perfect and Diffuse Anti-Phase Boundaries in HCP-Based Ti-Al Alloys

First-principles thermodynamic models based on the cluster expansion formalism, monte-carlo simulations and quantum-mechanical total energy calculations are employed to compute short-range-order parameters and diffuse-antiphase-boundary energies in hcp-based $\alpha$-Ti-Al alloys. Our calculations unambiguously reveal a substantial amount of SRO is present in $\alpha$-Ti-6 Al and that, at typical processing temperatures concentrations, the DAPB energies associated with a single dislocation slip can reach 25 mJ/m$^{2}$. We find very little anisotropy between the energies of DAPBs lying in the basal and prism planes. Perfect antiphase boundaries in DO$_{19}$ ordered Ti$_3$Al are also investigated and their interfacial energies, interfacial stresses and local displacements are calculated from first principles through direct supercell calculations. Our results are discussed in light of mechanical property measurements and deformation microstructure strudies in $\alpha$ Ti-Al alloys

Detecting response styles by using dual scaling of successive categories

A response style denotes a certain mapping of latent preferences toa rating scale that is common among a certain group of individuals.For example, individuals from the same country may assign highratings to the majority of objects regardless of the specificpreferences for the objects. The existence of response styles causesproblems in international and cross-cultural research as it makes ithard to compare findings. Moreover, even within homogeneous samples,response styles make it difficult to expose the underlyingpreference structure. Detecting the existence and influence of aresponse style is typically a difficult issue as the underlyingpreferences are not directly observable. Hence, we can never be sureif the observed ratings are the result of a response style or anadequate representation of the preferences. In this paper, weconsider the use of dual scaling as a tool to detect the existenceof a response style. By means of a simulation study, we assess theperformance of the proposed method.

Induction methods used in low temperature physics

A study has been made of induction bridges used in low temperature physics.\ud \ud In Part 1 the design of a mutual inductance bridge of the Hartshorn type is discussed. This design is based on a critical analysis of impurity effects of the different parts of the Hartshorn bridge. With this equipment frequencies up to 0.5 MHz can be used. Two methods have been developed to examine the secondary signal. In one of these use has been made of AD conversion techniques. In the other one, the secondary signal, produced by a superconducting sample, which is generally distorted, is analysed by using a Fourier expansion.\ud \ud In Part 2 equipment is described which enables us to measure the phase and amplitude of the harmonics of the output signal of the bridge. For synchronous detection a reference signal of the same frequency of the harmonic of interest is required. This reference signal is generated from the input signal of the bridge by means of a digital frequency multiplier with programmable multiplication factor N.\ud \ud In Part 3 some experimental results, showing the possibilities of the equipment, on some superconductors are presented

User Feedback in Probabilistic XML

Data integration is a challenging problem in many application areas. Approaches mostly attempt to resolve semantic uncertainty and conflicts between information sources as part of the data integration process. In some application areas, this is impractical or even prohibitive, for example, in an ambient environment where devices on an ad hoc basis have to exchange information autonomously. We have proposed a probabilistic XML approach that allows data integration without user involvement by storing semantic uncertainty and conflicts in the integrated XML data. As a\ud consequence, the integrated information source represents\ud all possible appearances of objects in the real world, the\ud so-called possible worlds.\ud \ud In this paper, we show how user feedback on query results\ud can resolve semantic uncertainty and conflicts in the\ud integrated data. Hence, user involvement is effectively postponed to query time, when a user is already interacting actively with the system. The technique relates positive and\ud negative statements on query answers to the possible worlds\ud of the information source thereby either reinforcing, penalizing, or eliminating possible worlds. We show that after repeated user feedback, an integrated information source better resembles the real world and may converge towards a non-probabilistic information source